I have a Venus Fly Trap I brought it like 2 months ago. Its been good in its puny box thing. I brought it at Gardening Ridge and one week I forgot to water it. It slowly started to die. So I transplanted it in a plastic pot with clay, humus, the soil that came with it and two other soils around my garden that i couldn't identify. I also wrinkled up magnolia leaves to use as mulch and weighed it with some sand. It is still dying. It is getting black in some parts and they are dying off. Currently it is on a table outside about three feet high and has one stem and bud which are both partially black. I know it was a big mistake to take it out, but i didn't know about this first. I'm probably not aloud to get perlite, peat moss, or play sand. Maybe distilled water, but if I can't can I use water from the fridge (Old filter)? I have a good light. Do i need to keep it outside, do I need to cut the one remaining stem thingy off almost to the bottom, and one last thing, is there even a way to keep my VFT alive with all these restrictions?

It is best to buy peat moss and perlite separately because most of soil mix do have fertilizer in them. Sail + VF= death plant I am assume you get your snow from the street where they spray down with salt to melt the snow? What you can do is wash the root with distilled water, get new media, keep it in low light and wait

Hi, I'm not clear on what you used to water your plants. The proper type of water is distilled water because that has been distilled to get pure water and leave the minerals and salts behind. It is not chlorine that is bad for carnivorous plants, it is the dissolved minerals like calcium, magnesium, etc. So boiling ordinary tap water isn't any good, you want to have pure water like distilled water, rainwater, or melted snow. If you in fact used tap water and just boiled it, well, that's not going to harm them once, but you should make sure you use distilled water or captured rainwater in the future. (I use rainwater or melted snow... right now I'm trying to get as much clean snow as I can, and melt it and save the water for summer -- got about 20 gallons right now, which is pretty much all I have room to store. But sometimes my outdoor plants get watered by accident by our lawn sprinkler, which is the bad tapwater - but I don't worry about it if it's only a few times per year.) Flooding things is okay, sometimes if we get some real rainy weather in the summer, my flytraps get completely submerged for several days in the aquarium I grow them in - doesn't seem to bother them at all. Better wet than dry. I would recommend planting each plant in a different pot when you can. I use pure long-fiber sphagnum moss, but most people here seem to prefer a mix of sphagnum, sand and perlite. I just tranplanted the flytraps in one of my aquariums last night... so here's a pic to give you an idea about what you can expect in the way of top growth and roots on a healthy mature flytrap, plan your pot size accordingly: You can grow flytraps fairly crowded, like shown below, as they don't seem to mind it. But if just starting off, I'd give them plenty of room to get them nice and healthy. Hope that helps. -Don

Ye agreed I was actually wondering about AV mix, it is suggested by professional AV growers that you use a mix of 1 part Sphagnum peat moss, 1 part Orchid bark and 1 part Vermiculite. This mix would be fine for any CP. Problem I have seen is many AV mixes differ and many are fertilized as well, this is a BEEEEG NO NO. You want 1 part Sphagnum Peat and 1 part Perlite. I know many Home Depots and Lowes carry large sacks of this at a good price as well. This is how I pot my plants. 1) Get some Dried Sphagnum Moss, soak it so that it rehydrates and place a layer of this at the bottom of your pot to cover the drainige holes, this will stop your soil mix from escaping when you water the plant. 2) Make a 50/50 mix of Sphagnum Peat(not the Sphagnum Moss) and fill the pot with this. 3) Give it a good soaking with pure water (Rain, Distilled or Reverse Osmosis water for your plant, no hard water if possible or without you knowing the hardness scale of your water in Parts Per Million) 4) Take a pen or pencil and make a hole in the soil mix, lay the roots of the plant over the hole and gently push them in with the blunt back of the pen/pencil. 5) Using your fingers carefully push the soil around the plant filling in the hole and packing it firmly. 6) Use a water tray, water the plant from above and let the drainige go into the tray, let it fill and leave this until the tray evaporates and then re water. The plant needs to stay constantly moist to wet, it needs full sun or 40watts of fluoresent lighting. If you have it indoors and will use fluoresent lighting a compact fluoresent bulb that is the equivelent of 100watts incandesent is good (anything over 20watts), these bulbs are those "energy saver bulbs" that coil around and fit normal light sockets. If you use this give your plant 12-14 hours per day in spring/summer. The plants go dorment naturally, depending on where you live you can let them go dorment in an unheated room like a garage. What you need for this is that your area receives cold winters with snow/ice, you would notice that the plant will slow growth and leaves will blacken when the plant decides to go dorment. Most people think they are dead, just remove the dead leaves and keep the soil moist, dont let it dry out! In spring you will notice some new growth, continue with watering and light as per its growing season in summer. FYI Dormency roughly begins on Halloween and ends by the latest on Valentines day. I grow my VFT's on a windowsill in an unheated garage here in Salt Lake City. Thus they get full sun from the window but are not exposed to the extreme desert heat in summer. As temps drop and lighting decreases in fall and winter the plant will naturally go dorment if it chooses too. hope that helps a little and other than that follow what akheadbanger said as well,as I see he has some pointers I missed (and yes, dont poke the flytrap) Sheldon